


The Annual Purge Is Decadent And Depraved

by steveelotaku



Category: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), The Purge (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, American Politics, Canon-Typical Debauchery, Canon-Typical Violence, Cockroaches, Gen, Hallucinations, Psychotropic Drugs, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 09:48:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steveelotaku/pseuds/steveelotaku
Summary: Raoul Duke is sent by Rolling Stone to cover the year's Purge and reflect on what it means as an American tradition.





	The Annual Purge Is Decadent And Depraved

It was early in the evening of March 23rd when I began to draft my evangelical message to the people of America. I got out of my car when it was just getting dark, and parked in the city's Latin quarter, a city which I'm instructed to not divulge the location of, and doubtless will in whatever missive follows this one. I'd come more than prepared to cover what I have been told is the greatest of American traditions--the annual Purge. In spite of its fairly recent addition to the long list of proud American traditions like Independence Day, Veteran's Day, Columbus Day, and President's Day, I am happy to say that it fits remarkably well with those proud holidays of yesteryear. It is truly an American tradition; it is violent, sick, weird, twisted beyond recognition and has an almost saintlike reverence for the militarization of the common citizen, the plundering of the resources of a once-proud nation, and a sweet, saccharine attitude that is associated with it. For come tomorrow morning, the psychopaths, the soldiers, the teenagers, the parents, the PTA and the Girl Scouts and even the godforsaken Republicans who were forced from office by the New Founding Fathers will take off their Halloween masks and put on their bright, cheerful masks of civility. The guns will be sold at half-off at Walmart, as discounts for prepping for next year.

My attorney advised me that when the alert sounds, the best place to be is at a party. No one likes to upset a mood at a party, after all, no matter what manner of violence this night is known for. I had come dressed in the rich, religious robes of Purge Night--a Hawaiian shirt, an American flag draped over my shoulders, a pair of tea-shade sunglasses, my trusty pith helmet, a pair of cargo shorts filled with blotter acid, amyls, uppers, downers, cocaine, and my car keys, and finally a pair of fresh white golf shoes. I had my notepad in one hand, a satchel slung over my shoulders with two cans of Budweiser and a mask of my hated foe Richard Nixon, and a revolver I was desperately hoping to not have to use stowed in a concealed pocket. I was meeting with my attorney on a street corner about five miles out from where I parked, and I knew that I'd be getting into the rotten business of purging soon enough.

The sound of gunfire had already begun to echo down the city streets mere moments after the warning that police and fire services would be suspended had finished playing. _What was the point,_ I thought. The poor bastards were gone as is--they'd been on strike for weeks and already private security had begun to take their jobs in the ultimate Darwinian expression of capitalism. 

Purge Night is a very freaky scene to begin with--but the later it gets, the worse it gets. Walking down the streets with an Eastwood-esque swagger (because you cannot let these bastards think you're easy prey, damn it), the revelry had already begun. I swear I saw half a dozen people in clown masks sawing open an ATM, three topless girls on the back of a donkey, whipping themselves as it dragged their bare flesh along harsh concrete walls, painting bloody American stripes along the side of a bank, and just as I rounded the corner, a group of cowboys in bandannas tap-dancing on the roof of a limousine. Their breath was vile and rancid; I could smell it from where I stood, and it stank of vodka. They began loudly singing "My Old Kentucky Home" in Russian accents so thick they reminded me of the Berlin Wall. Mother of God, Nixon was right. These were foreigners, Russian Reds come to take America's pride and joy from it. I nearly threw up in my mouth, but that may have been the shock of seeing a violation and abasement of good old American violence and culture (not mutually exclusive) while snorting a line off of a 50-year-old man who proclaimed himself to be a table. He was, in fact, a good table, and I slipped him a few uppers to get him through the night. The poor bastard would need them, as I had the horrible feeling he would be used to hold a lot more than coffee, donuts, and the white powder that keeps the film industry together.

Purge Night is often compared to Halloween, and indeed, it's the Halloween industry that makes a killing on this night. Spirit Halloween employees, disgruntled at lack of consistent work, and packing a year's worth of masks and costumes trade their silicon swords and plastic guns for real ones and get down to the sordid business of stimulating the economy. There are few things more bizarre and American than watching temporary workers carving up their fickle employers and handing out pieces like Jesus at the Last Supper, but there I was, observing it all.

"What are you looking at?" one said. "You wanna end up like him?"

I told him I didn't--I just was wondering where to get one of those fancy glowing masks. Rubber, after a while, stifles, and latex is limiting in its heat. I also didn't want my head shoved firmly into the base of Nixon's neck--the effect was too much like a condom to be comfortable, and I would never want to wear the flayed flesh of Nixon upon my manhood, no matter how desperate I am to desecrate his memory.

So I ended up throwing a bottle of pills to them, screaming "Trick or treat! Long live the Purge! Butcher the pigs and seize the means of production!" Then they welcomed me into their number, baptizing me with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and as I prayed to their garish neon gospel, I put on a mask with a glowing blue grin and drove my Nixon mask onto a spike. They cheered and ripped off their costumes, dancing around in a naked orgy around a burning pile of pink slips. Horse heads and pig heads and hockey masks all mingled with screaming ghost faces and Fred Flintstone, who rubbed his testicles over a roll of red tape before hanging the desecrated remains of their boss's skeleton from a tree, whacking at it like a pinata.

Ten blocks later, the drugs had begun to take hold, and I'd slipped myself a few sheets of acid. I'd seen too much already--a crowd of winos kicked to death by trust funders wearing the heads of football mascots, black men in Klan robes chasing white people in blackface down the street, an entire car filled with nothing but shrimp, and a group of old men in Abe Lincoln outfits out firing at random.

The party, I knew, was the place I had to reach, and I'd only just barely gotten near when I felt some muscular, hairy arms drag me into the alley nearby as if I was about to be molested by King Kong.

"Let go of me!" I protested. "I'm a Second Amendment advocate, you evolutionary throwback, and I'm going to blow your head off if you so much as bend my glasses! This is America, not the Planet of the Apes! I am not a number, I am a free man!"

"As your attorney, I advise you to calm down," my attorney said. Good old Dr. Gonzo, the Samoan nationalist, the pride and joy of a thousand drunken partygoers and the horror of the many, many women of America. He stood there in a torn suit, his beer gut hanging out like a beached whale on the edge of a cliff. 

"You absolute fucking madman. I could have killed you."

"No, you couldn't have," he said, and I knew deep down, he was right. Not even God himself could kill that man.

"So why aren't we going into the party?" I asked, a few minutes later.

"Because the party is being used to set up some kind of mass murder of the poor. That's what the Purge is about. It's always been about getting rid of the poor."

Of course. It all made sense. This was very much in the spirit of the holidays--driving out people you didn't like while wearing masks and acting as horribly as possible while extolling the virtues of cheerfulness and good moral character. But I've always considered myself something of a proponent of the counter-culture. While I am, and have always been, a proud American who watches the Super Bowl each year, I cannot possibly in good conscience claim to share its values of greed, apathy, and killing under false pretenses.

Something had to be done, goddammit, and as the entire streetscape around me began to blur into some grotesque silent film, the people around me becoming jerky cartoon caricatures of men, I made my plan.

"Please tell me you brought the goddamn ether. We're gonna need a lot of it."

Ether. The devil's favourite drink. One good long sniff of this stuff and you're the walking poster boy for Prohibition. A drunken mess, staggering around and dragging down everyone with you. I'd already had my fill of the stuff in Vegas, back in my glory days, but we still kept some around, if only to remind ourselves we could never confuse inebriation for enlightenment. The Purge was a modern drug, a modern infection--and ether was our anesthetic. We needed some goddamn surgery in here. And the good Dr. Gonzo with his greasy blue suit coat and once-white torn-open shirt, was in. He opened a massive briefcase, and inside was a vast quantity of ether. 

"You won't find booze at the party," he said.

That was too much to bear. I damn near shouted.

"What has this shithole country come to when you can't get booze at a party? You call this a purge? This isn't even Montezuma's Revenge! I've purged more in my toilet!"

"There's no booze. They vape. These paramilitary types, these hipster mercenaries, they all use e-cigarettes."

My god. They didn't even smoke an actual cigarette. Truly, these were the coddled, entitled brats of the modern era. Say what you will about the youth of today, but I caught some young punk in my yard with a cigarette in his mouth and a half-eaten piece of avocado toast. These GI Joes didn't even have the common decency to pollute their lungs with proper poison.

"They smoke a lot?"

"A lot. They're doing a mass cartridge distribution tonight. But the idiots are drawing from a communal source. All we gotta do..."

"Is swap it for the ether. By God, man, you're a genius!"

People were going to die if we didn't do something, but we weren't going to just be able to walk in. And so, I did what I've found works remarkably well.

I gave my attorney a salmon sandwich and three sheets of acid.

"Take these. Get in the nearest car. I want you to land that son of a bitch in their swimming pool. I'll slip in from behind."

"As your attorney, I advise you to use every bottle, and when you're done, dose yourself as to avoid suspicion."

Better advice had not been spoken by anyone. Before anyone really knew it, the good Dr. Gonzo had smashed through the glass wall of the pretentious party, and about 40 rednecks, incels, bank managers, and sexually insecure people playing soldier took notice of the massive Samoan floating in their pool in a Ferrari, grinning as if God himself had come to bless the place.

"This man has a heart condition!" I shouted, before bolting. Confused, they descended upon him to help him, not entirely sure why. 

In about five minutes I'd so thoroughly tainted the supply for the vapes that it resembled the moral fibre of your average senator. Unfortunately, I was still so far deep in the grip of acid's harsh, dominant love that I managed to realize where I was.

We were in a den of cockroaches--not true predators, no, but mere scavengers gnawing away at the shit left behind by the presidents and politicians. And I swore right then and there that my hands were absolutely covered in them. Spouting all manner of strange slogans. "Make America Great Again!" "No Taxation Without Representation!" "You Can't Lick Our Dick!"

There was nothing decent, nothing kind about any of it, and I dropped the final bottle of ether down into the building's central ventilation.

There was just one problem now. 

Two, in fact.

One, everyone was going to be unconscious very, very soon.

Two, that would include Dr. Gonzo.

So, tearing my shirt from my body and soaking it in urine like the soldiers of WW1 blocking out mustard gas, I tied it about my face and ran in screaming.

"YOU SONS OF BITCHES KILLED AMERICA! AND YOU PUT DOWN LASSIE, YOU MOTHERLESS MISFITS! ROLL OUT THE RED CARPET, BECAUSE JESUS IS COMING AGAIN AND NONE OF YOU ARE READY FOR HIM! PACKERS WIN THE SUPER BOWL! NONE OF YOU DESERVED THE NEW YORK YANKEES, AND YOU KNOW IT!"

I'd said too much. Guns were trained on me, and I knew right now the only hope was the near-unconscious Gonzo.

It's a fact rarely talked about that Samoans are the greatest wrestlers on earth, and that their enormous bodies are greatly immune to the properties of most psychotropic drugs. Dr. Gonzo had not been addled by the acid--in fact, it had only enhanced his finely-tuned rage. He took one man touching his neck to feel for a pulse and he bowled him straight into the crowd of angry militia that was just starting to fall into a stupor.

I bolted for my attorney, and lugging his massively far form out of the pool, I booked it for about two blocks before shoving him into the bed of a pickup truck.

We had still a few hours left before sunrise, and I knew that unless we found somewhere safe to stay, neither of us would live to finish the report or do something good for this mistake of a holiday.

So that's how we ended up in the basement of a Holiday Inn, among a bunch of poor runaways and scared, bloody hobos.

And so it was to that crowd I preached the sermon.

The Annual Purge is a decadent, depraved tradition stemming from the basest of human desires--and unlike the Super Bowl there is no athletic justification. The New Founding Fathers are frauds, just like anything "New." They are the New Coke, the New Monkees, the New Generation--an empty promise of change built upon stale old traditions taken to their worst possible conclusion. This is the savage heart of America, beating loudly with the drums and pipes of John Philip Sousa. There is no dream left, no dream worth clinging onto. I sometimes wonder what would have happen if old Dick had stuck around long enough to see this happen--would he have joined in this heartless massacre, or would there have been enough left of his blackened heart to say no? We've reached a point where even our holidays have become a polarized center of misplaced didactic rhetoric. Good and evil are now just terms for opposing sides--the common man is caught in the middle, prey for a bunch of wolves in trick-or-treat masks.

And come the morning, every single one of these hypocritical bastards will hang up their masks and say "Good morning" to each other. The sick sons-of-bitches.

I didn't find a tradition here tonight, but I did find America, in its usual habitat. Some will blame TV. Some will blame books. Some will blame video games. Maybe it's the gays that forced peoples' hands, or the Catholics, or the Jews, or the Protestants, or the Sikhs, or the McDonalds workers, or the Marlboro Man. Maybe it was those fucking singing chipmunks.

But I know who to blame, and it's effectively the same people who sent me here to cover this fucking disaster of a celebration.

Consider this my resignation.

\--Raoul Duke


End file.
